Case Study
University of South Florida
University of South Florida
Using Citrix XenApp, university delivers anytime, anywhere access
for students
A major university provides 47,000 students with anytime, anywhere
access to applications they need with Citrix XenApp, saving
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Key benefits
• Enables greater accessibility and
flexibility
• Saves nearly $300,000 each year
• Cuts troubleshooting and repair
by 80 percent
Citrix products
•Citrix® XenApp®
• Citrix XenDesktop®
• Citrix XenServer®
• Citrix NetScaler Gateway™
• Citrix Receiver™
University of South Florida is one of the largest public universities in the nation, supporting more
than 47,000 students across three separately accredited institutions: USF Tampa, USF St. Petersburg
and USF Sarasota-Manatee. The university ranks 10th among universities granted U.S. patents and
is classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a top-tier research
university, a distinction obtained by only 2.3 percent of all universities. Its heritage of innovation
serves the university well when it comes to making the right technology available for its students,
professors and administrators, no matter where they are or when they need it.
The challenge: Giving today’s mobile
students 24/7 access
“Originally we provided thousands of desktops in
computer labs across the university to give
students access to the computing resources they
needed for their classes,” says Craig Woolley,
assistant vice president of IT support services for
the university. “A few years ago, we decided to
implement a mobility strategy that would better
support the needs of today’s students: on- and
off-campus access and the ability to use their
own devices anytime, anywhere.” The new
strategy coincided with the university’s goal to
reduce the time and expense of maintaining a
burgeoning number of computer labs.
The solution: Delivering applications on
demand to any device
For its new application gateway, the university
used Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenServer, Citrix
NetScaler® and Citrix Receiver to provide
on-demand access to applications from
anywhere, on any device. Beyond providing 24/7
remote and on-campus access to the student
citrix.com
population, the university’s audit and compliance
team uses the XenApp portal and Citrix Receiver
to access protected applications. The university is
also using XenDesktop for small kiosks across
campus. “Citrix is the leader in offering
accessibility from any device, and that was a key
selling point for us when we selected Citrix over
Microsoft and VMware,” says Jason Hair, assistant
director of IT support services at the university.
Key benefit: Enables new levels of
accessibility and flexibility
“With Citrix, we can deliver services and
capabilities we either couldn’t do at all before or
were very costly and time consuming to provide,”
says Woolley. “It’s helping students become more
successful because they have access to high-end
resources such as computer-aided design
applications anywhere, anytime.” The university’s
SMARTLab wouldn’t be possible without Citrix.
The on-campus lab includes more than 350
machines that are set up to switch automatically
between different configurations during certain
parts of the day, depending on class and
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Case Study
University of South Florida
instructor needs. “Citrix also enables us to provide
students or faculty with special needs access to
ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act]-compliant
software on demand,” says Hair.
“By moving to the Citrix solution,
we cut our number of trouble
tickets by more than 80 percent,
while delivering a more
consistent experience for
students and faculty.”
Jason Hair
Assistant Director of IT Support
Services, University of South Florida
Key benefit: Saves nearly $300,000 each year
By moving to Citrix, the university not only met
its goal of delivering greater accessibility to all
its students, both on and off campus, but it
substantially decreased its costs. By reducing
the number of open-use labs from eight to one
and cutting the number of machines in those
labs from 393 to 167, the university is saving
nearly $300,000 each year on equipment and IT
staffing costs. “This end-to-end solution makes
us far more efficient in maintaining our
on-campus infrastructure,” says Woolley.
Key benefit: Cuts troubleshooting and
repair by 80 percent
The university can now virtually manage the
1,600 desktops in the computer labs remaining
on campus. “By moving to the Citrix solution,
we cut our number of trouble tickets by more
than 80 percent, while delivering a more
consistent experience for students and faculty,”
says Hair. Before the new application gateway
was deployed, the percentage of trouble tickets
for software configuration issues was 90
percent, with only 10 percent caused by wearand-tear hardware issues. Now, software
configuration issues represent only 10 percent
of trouble tickets. Better yet, they can be solved
immediately using the Citrix solution, with no
on-site technical support required.
Looking ahead
“Now that we have our Citrix solution in place, I
predict that usage will continue growing from
this point on,” says Woolley. In addition to
expanding its current usage on its own
campuses, the university is contemplating
offering the solution to other institutions. For
universities without the IT resources to create a
similar architecture, University of South Florida
could provide a hosted solution. For now,
though, the university is happy with delivering
what it takes to help its students be successful,
wherever they are.
About Citrix
Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) is a leader in mobile workspaces, providing virtualization, mobility management, networking and cloud services to
enable new ways to work better. Citrix solutions power business mobility through secure, personal workspaces that provide people with
instant access to apps, desktops, data and communications on any device, over any network and cloud. This year Citrix is celebrating 25
years of innovation, making IT simpler and people more productive. With annual revenue in 2013 of $2.9 billion, Citrix solutions are in use at
more than 330,000 organizations and by over 100 million users globally. Learn more at www.citrix.com.
Copyright © 2014 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix, XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer, NetScaler, NetScaler Gateway and Citrix
Receiver are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. and other countries. Other
product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
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